I was ten years post-op in 1982, the year the film “Blade Runner” came out.
I found myself identifying with Pris, the replicant played by Daryl Hannah. I found a perfect metaphor to describe how transsexuals were treated not only by the doctors but by a lot of society as well.
We looked human and acted like humans. Some of us even tried to create fictional pasts and happy normal childhoods for ourselves.
Others spoke of the doctors who did their surgery in term that sounded almost like those the replicants used for their creators.
We didn’t need the doctors to tell us that passing improved the way we were treated and up graded our status from replicant to human.
In the film there was one Replicant, Rachael, who was one of the most perfect replicants ever. they had a version of one of those multi-phasic personality tests that the Normies used to root out Replicants.
It usually took 20-30 questions to unmask a replicant. It took 120 questions to unmask Rachael.
I’ve known sisters like Rachael, so perfect in every way with a loving supportive family.
I’m far too defiantly punk to be bothered with trying to be so deep stealth, too sure of my own validity, too willing to say I am not a replicant even though I had sex reassignment surgery.
In 1982 Dr. Laub gave me the ten year follow up questionnaire. I found some of the questions dehumanizing and told Judy Van Maasdam what I thought of those questions. I said I know you really consider us replicants and not really human.
Judy was shocked that I thought they treated us like replicants, experiments and not like ordinary humans.
She chastised me for calling myself a replicant. I said, “Replicant is the polite term, the cruel term is “skin job.”
I was pretty battered by 1982.
That year I had marched in the Pride Day with what was the only lesbian contingent that welcomed post-transsexual women, the S/M contingents, Samois and the Outlaws.
I wore leather and marched topless. I had a bad attitude and was filled with contempt for the radfems and the book banning, anti-sex followers of Dworkin and MacKennon.
My leathers were more punk than S/M but my attitude towards the the radfem/anti-sex transphobic bigots was real.
I didn’t tell Judy half of the shit post-transsexual women were being put through, because between the reactionary right wing crap the psych establishment was pushing in order to pathologize us and the hateful bigotry of the radfems it was hard to remain functional and not become so depressed suicide or substance abuse seemed like the only alternatives.
How could one explain to a Normie what it felt like to have your legitimacy as a human being treated as something open to debate.
How feminist groups had so many categories that we treated as meriting special consideration and how words like disabled were being banished from the language, even when used as an unthinking adjective. Except being or having been transsexual meant that you were fair game for the vilest sort of verbal and emotional abuse.
I opted for isolation, withdrawing into myself.
I also got the hell out of the snake pit of the San Francisco “Lesbian Community.”
Hey I’m bisexual. I don’t need this shit.
I’d rather hang out with people who make music, paint, do photography.
I’d rather go to concerts with gay male friends.
Anything to avoid the bigotry of the radfem shits.
I moved back to LA where the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center was nothing like what had been going on in SF.
But I had learned my lesson.
It took me a long time to own my body. To feel good about my cunt and not give a shit about lesbian scum who would reject me because my cunt has surgical scars.
Over the years I stopped going to lesbian bars. Usually the ambiance sucks and the attitudes toward Ts/TG women suck even worse.
Yeah you have a right to not sleep with us. Just like you have a right to sleep only with white, blonde, northern European women who are Catholic.
But the fucking cotton ceiling isn’t about that. No one gives a shit about what your personal sexual preferences are.
Don’t insult us by pretending your hatred of TS/TG people isn’t bigotry.
It is and transphobia is a real word.
Radfems need to buy a fucking clue. Their screaming about the terror and harm being inflicted upon them by transsexual and transgender women is both bigotry and has all the appearances of a pathology.
One tenth to one quarter of one percent of people who are among the most despised and deprived, powerless people on earth aren’t much of a threat to anyone. Particularly when so many of them are caught up in inner struggles trying to make sense of why they are TS or TG.
Particularly when that tiny percentage of people is generally speaking at or close to the bottom of the socioeconomic and political power ladder.
Most TS/TG people aren’t all that economically advantaged.
Unlike tenured radfem academics and lawyers whose firm represents Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan.
The cotton ceiling isn’t about your personal preferences in sexual partners.
It is about creating a climate of hate that pathologizes, delegitmatizes and demonizes our genitalia and our entire beings.
We do not go into the Pleasure Chest and buy our vaginas from the shelf like they are the dildos so many lesbians seem to be into.
Our bodies, ourselves…
Despite the blood libel of the radfems I colonized no one’s body. I took control of my own.
My taking female hormones altered the chemistry of my own body and the shape of my body became that which it is with an estrogen based body chemistry.
As for the “powerful drugs” I take, they aren’t all that different from the early birth control pills. Indeed one of the early medications I took was a birth control pill.
As for my surgeries and scars…
You have no idea the level of contempt I hold you in when you abuse your Normie privilege by treating my body as something to sneer at and abuse.
I just bet you are a bundle of laughs when it comes to other differently abled people.
Oh I forgot.
They are sacred.
Do you ridicule women who have had hysterectomies or mastectomies?
When you argue chromosomal level essentialism, have you had your own chromosomes examined to make certain they are perfect?
Besides which, doesn’t that chromosomal level essentialism reify patriarchal ideas regarding the essential differences between men and women, a proposition that is a slippery slope to male supremacy and female inferiority.
Or is it just our cunts that offend you?
Is it the scars?
It must be nice to be a Normie supremacist and be able to look down on skin jobs like me.
It must be nice to be a Normie and sneer at and ridicule the bodies and lives of TS/TG replicants.
Do you have any idea the level of privilege you expect when you demand the “right” to discriminate and legally deny us our equality and our human rights?
Some TS/TG people have spoken as to how they hate you for your sense of superiority.
You expect us to have the same hatred for ourselves, that you hold for us and are surprised when we don’t.
It must really blow your minds that we are no longer good little replicants cowering in hurt from your abuse.
It must fuck with your cosmology for us to organize and stand up for our rights, even if our existence offends you.
You want to be separate, be separate. You do not speak for most women. Or, considering how much progress TS/TG sisters have made within the lesbian feminist communities, even for most lesbians.
And if we treat you like Aryan Nation or the KKK it is because you are like Aryan Nation and the KKK, bigots with nothing to offer but hate.